Fast Facts
- Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku and Sonnet models became available on Google's cloud Tuesday.
- At the same time, Microsoft struck a significant deal with another AI startup, Inflection.
Earlier in March, Google (GOOG) announced that Anthropic's new family of artificial intelligence models — dubbed Claude 3 — will be made available to paying customers on Google's cloud-based Vertex AI platform.
Anthropic said Tuesday that two of the three members of that family — Claude 3 Haiku and Sonnet, both smaller and faster than its largest, highest-performer Claude 3 Opus — are now generally available on the platform.
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Anthropic said that Opus will be made available on the platform in the coming weeks.
"This collaboration enables businesses to quickly prototype and scale generative AI solutions with enterprise-grade data privacy and security," Anthropic said in a blog post.
This latest evolution of the partnership between the two companies, which began right at Anthropic's founding in 2021, comes several months after Google pledged to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic. Part of that agreement involved a $500 million cash infusion, with the remaining $1.5 billion to be invested over time.
Related: Microsoft CEO hedges OpenAI bet, launches new AI organization
Microsoft eats some Pi
On the same day that two-thirds of the Claude 3 family became available on Google's Vertex platform, fellow tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) completed what seems to be a soft acquisition of another well-known AI startup: Inflection, the company behind the free, personal chatbot it calls Pi.
Microsoft said in a memo Tuesday that it is launching a new organization — Microsoft AI — which will bundle all of Microsoft's consumer-facing AI efforts, including copilot, together under one roof. That new organization, Microsoft said, will be led by Mustafa Suleyman, the DeepMind founder who later co-founded Inflection.
Karén Simonyan, another Inflect co-founder, is joining Suleyman as Microsoft AI's chief scientist.
I've said it and will say it again. Concentration of power is the biggest risk in AI!
— clem 🤗 (@ClementDelangue) March 19, 2024
"Several members" of Inflection's team, including engineers and researchers, are coming with their two founders, according to Microsoft. According to Bloomberg, however, Microsoft, as part of the arrangement, is "hiring most of" Inflection's staff.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding this point.
At the same time as Microsoft announced the hollowing-out of this once-promising startup, Inflection announced a few changes itself; the company is abandoning its consumer-facing personal AI assistant efforts and is instead pivoting to the enterprise side of things, offering its latest model — Inflection 2.5 — on Microsoft Azure.
Inflection, according to The Information, told investors that it will fully recoup its investment in the startup, which has raised more than $1.5 billion from investors including Microsoft.
This semi-acquisition from Microsoft comes as the latest in a lengthening list of similar partnerships and deals. Microsoft in February announced a partnership with French startup Mistral that included a $16 million investment.
The company is also, of course, OpenAI's largest benefactor, having invested more than $10 billion in the startup behind ChatGPT, earning itself a non-voting board seat (and access to OpenAI's technology) in the process.
In the midst of all these deals, the European Commission said in January that it is investigating Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI.
"There's no such thing as an AI startup, just guys with models competing to be absorbed by one of the three actual AI companies," Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, said in a post on X.
In the midst of inflating valuations and soaring stock prices, the tech giants continue to focus on pushing more and more AI, even as global regulatory efforts remain both nascent and tentative, and as concerns over the ethical implications of the tech continue to swirl.
"AI startups," Clement Delangue, the CEO of AI platform Hugging Face, warned in a post on X, "be careful not to fall into the same trap."
Contact Ian with tips and AI stories via email, ian.krietzberg@thearenagroup.net, or Signal 732-804-1223.
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